Peyton Manning’s last stand

A few years ago I saw Bob Dylan in concert in Melbourne. Edging into his 70s, Dylan was barely recognisable. His voice was shot, thanks to old age and an earnest, life-long commitment to cigarettes.

He wasn’t Bob Dylan anymore, but the songs were his, and every now and then, on a particular line or a particular note, you could close your eyes and pretend it was 1966.

Where Dylan has had cigarettes, Peyton Manning has had neck surgeries. Manning turns 40 next year, which might as well be 70 in quarterback years.

By most calculations one of the five greatest quarterbacks of all time, this year by DVOA Manning has been the worst quarterback in the league. For the past decade and a half Manning has been an elite offence by himself, but entering Sunday night he was leading the single worst offence in the NFL.

Manning is at the awkward stage of his career where commentators are still paying him respect for what he’s done in the past while the public is treating him as a punchline for what he’s doing in the present. The stats are bad – seven touchdowns, 11 interceptions and a 75.1 passer rating (32nd out of 33 qualified quarterbacks, and 17 points below Brandon Weeden) – and the eye test is worse.

Manning has become a punchline because of the total lack of punch on his passes – his deep ball has become an arm punt, hovering hopelessly before meekly and suddenly falling incomplete.

And yet his team is undefeated.

Manning has never been a physically imposing or aesthetically breathtaking quarterback. He’s never had a canon arm or thrown liquid laser beams like Aaron Rodgers. While his two contemporaries in excellence, Rodgers and Tom Brady, are quarterback rockstars, Manning has always been a grand symphony orchestra conductor. #18 is death by a thousand audibles, slowly, meticulously carving up his opponent one perfect read at a time.

Even if his body has abandoned him, Manning’s brain is enough to keep this Broncos team a title contender. All season there have been flashes of Manning’s past brilliance: a remarkable end-of-game drive to beat the Chiefs in Week 2, a 300-yard, 100 passer rating day against the Lions the following week, and then there was Sunday night.

It’s hard to remember the last time Peyton Manning was a three-point underdog at home. That was the set-up against Green Bay though, in a game that had narrative written all over it, with the script seemingly destined to be Aaron Rodgers’ coronation at the expense of a former king.

Manning and the fearsome Broncos defence threw the script in the trash-can though, with a pass rush in Rodgers’ face all night, and Manning clinical on the other side of the ball.

340 yards, an interception and no touchdowns would have been a sub-par game any another season in Manning’s career. This year though, in this context, it is everything. He caressed short and intermediate passes with perfect timing to crossing routes over the middle and completed four of his six deep passes for 119 yards. Most importantly, for the first time since 2014, he looked like Peyton Manning again.

Until Sunday, Manning had been relying more on the spectre of himself than the reality. Defences still respect the man because of all he’s accomplished. They see that awkward, legs-spread quarterback stance in the shotgun, balanced and planted like Cristiano Ronaldo before a free kick, and fear that Manning is going to do to them what he’s done to so many defences over the past 17 years. But until Sunday, Manning hadn’t been that person. He’d been an actor paying tribute to a role of past glory, the NFL’s answer to Michael Keaton in Birdman.

The last act of a champion’s career is the most difficult to watch but it’s also the most compelling. There’s something disconcerting and unnatural about watching Joe Montana in a Chiefs jersey or Manning in Bronco orange. We know they’re not the same, and suspect they probably know it too. But there are flashes. And if there are enough flashes, you start to believe, and so do they.

Manning has had enough of those flashes that the Broncos can win the Super Bowl. But if they do, it won’t be because of him. Denver has the best defence in the league. They just kept Aaron Freaking Rodgers to 50 yards and gave the Packers little on the ground. The only two times Denver has given up more than 20 points this season were because of interceptions returned for touchdowns.

With a ferocious pass rush and an air-tight secondary, the Broncos have a great defence that could elevate to a historic one. It’s fitting that after spending most of his career trying to compensate for terrible defences with explosive offences, Manning is left trying to win a final ring with the inverse situation.

With an unusually high number of unbeaten teams in the league this year, the title race is wide open. The Patriots are the favourites but they have serious offensive line issues and a middling defence. The Seahawks are a mess and the Bengals are still starting Andy Dalton. The Packers just got crushed 29-10. Does anybody really think Carolina is winning the Super Bowl with those receivers?

A great defence and a competent quarterback might be all you need to win a ring, especially when that quarterback can still be ‘Peyton Manning’ from time to time.